The Oppenheimer Chair is pleased to welcome Faten Kikano, PhD Candidate in Environmental Design, from the Université de Montréal for a conference and a photo exhibition. Ms. Kikano will present her research and her photos about the life of Syrian refugees in camps in Lebanon and Jordan. Join us for a lunch, a short conference…

The Oppenheimer Chair and the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism are pleased to welcome Dr. Sonia Cancian, from Zayed University for a seminar on life stories of migrants and refugees and the law. This seminar will lead a discussion on life stories of migrants and refugees and their power (or not) within…

Description: Moderated by Sally Armstrong, this conversation between High Commissioner Filippo Grandi and poet-activist Ketty Nivyabandi will explore the leadership of women in finding solutions to displacement.

Speakers:

Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees. HC Grandi has been engaged in refugee and humanitarian work for more than 30 years.

Ketty Nivyabandi, Burundian poet, writer and activist. Her leadership in mobilizing women in protest against the Burundi government led to her fleeing from persecution to Canada.

This event is brought to you by the Center for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism at McGill and the Oppenheimer Chair for Public International Law, in collaboration with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

The Oppenheimer Chair and the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism (CHRLP) are pleased to welcome Florian Couveinhes Matsumoto, from the École normale supérieure (Paris, France), for a conference on the potential threats to Democracy posed by treaties, and on more democratic ways to negotiate, adopt and ratify them.

In this conference, Florian Couveinhes Matsumoto will give an overview of his research, which revolves around three distinct, but related topics: first, the way treaties – and especially trade agreements, investment treaties and treaties that establish international organizations – were and are used by a business and political elite to impose unpopular organs, procedures and policies over which people (and in most cases even domestic parliaments) have little control; second, the reasons explaining why these methods are increasingly problematic and criticized, and why some political circles are willing to seriously address this issue; third, how to improve the democratic character of treaty negotiations, adoption and ratification, in order to avoid two major contemporary problems: the fact that many treaties only secure the interests of a small minority of technocrats and large international corporations, to the detriment of ordinary people, and the issues raised by political uproars leading to the election of governments that are against the current form of international cooperation and international Law, but with no valuable alternatives.

The presentation is moderated by Professor François Crépeau, director of the CHRLP, and will be followed by a discussion with the audience.

The Israeli High Court of Justice and the Israeli Settlements in the Occupied West Bank

2 October, 2017

The Center for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism and the Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law are pleased to present:

“A Venue for Justice or an Occupation Accomplice?: The Israeli High Court of Justice and the Israeli Settlements in the Occupied West Bank”

When: Friday October 13th, 13:00-14:30

Where: New Chancellor Day Hall, McGill Faculty of Law, room #609

This talk will provide an overview of how the Israeli Supreme Court of Justice (HCJ) has interpreted and applied principles of the international law of occupation in adjudicating petitions that were filed by Palestinians to challenge the legality of security based measures that were implemented for the alleged safety of Israeli settlements and settlers in the occupied West Bank after the outbreak of the Second Intifada (2000) .

The first element to consider is the extent to which the Court has provided Palestinian petitioners with a venue for an effective domestic remedy for alleged violations of their internationally protected rights. The research adopts the HCJ’s position that the international law of occupation is guided by an internal logic of balancing between the Occupant’s security requirements and the fundamental rights of the occupied population. It also espouses that this logic is reflected in the three normative principles underlying this body of law: stating that occupation is ‘temporary’, that it is a form of trust, and that it does not bestow sovereignty by the Occupant over the occupied territory. Hence, the second question that the research attempts to answer is whether the Court’s adjudication has promoted or undermined those principles.

Speaker Bio: Rouba Al-Salem has an undergraduate degree in International Relations from the American University in Cairo. Later, she obtained a Master of Arts in Middle East Politics from Exeter University (UK) and a Master of Law in Public International Law from the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK). In 2016, she graduated with a PhD in law from Montreal University’s faculty of law and is currently a postdoctoral (Steinberg) fellow in international migration rights and policy at the Center for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism (McGill) for the year (2017-2018). In the past, she has worked in and on human rights issues as they relate to the Middle East region, including for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The McGill Center for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism hereby invites you to its big conference of William A. Schabas moderated by François Crépeau and followed by a discussion with Frédéric Mégret and Nidal N. Jurdi.

As you know, 2017 is a very pivotal year for international criminal justice. It marks the 72nd anniversary of the establishment of the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, the 71st anniversary of the establishment of military tribunals in the Far East, a special year for the United Nations ad hoc tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda both of which are in a gradual completion of their respective mandates and without forgetting the anniversary of the entry into force of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

15 years after the establishment of this judicial institution as a permanent body with a universal vocation operating under the new premise of complementarity to national jurisdictions, this tribunal is now at a crossroads: high-level state officials accused for having committed grave crimes continue to travel around the world, key witnesses are assassinated, charges have been dropped by the office of the prosecutor itself, preliminary examinations stagnate whenever the most powerful are concerned. In Syria, as well as in every situation where nationals of the permanent members of the Security Council or their allies are concerned, it is a total inactivity. Even where the judicial system seems to be moving forward, the immunities of heads of state on the one hand and, most seriously, immunities for heads of non-state parties on the other hand, have come to poison the procedure. On the African side, some states start slamming the door of the Court while building a relatively parallel system at a regional level.

In light of all these challenges in the institutionalization of the universality of international justice, seven decades after the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals, more than two decades after the creation of ad hoc tribunals and in view of all the challenges faced by the ICC in only 15 years of operation, the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism organizes this timely conference that brings together different perspectives on this unique and topical theme: “Is the world ready for global justice?”

An excellent article about those who stay home and receive news of those who have gone abroad. Many thanks to Raoul

“I would like to say something along the lines of how the refugees are Syria’s loss and the world’s gain, but I’m not sure that’s entirely true. Abandoning one’s identity is like ripping a heart out of a body. I think of the families of friends who have migrated en masse. For example, I received a phone call from the father of a friend, a man over 70 years old, who spoke to me in tears. He just wanted to speak to someone who understood his language, who understood the secrets of the language, who would listen to a joke in his version of colloquial Syrian and who would have a hearty laugh with him. A hearty laugh – that’s a metaphor for the way people like to live, and refugees in general do not find many reasons to laugh, especially in their first years in exile. But not long after that conversation, the phones stopped ringing. Everyone had dropped into the black hole of exile.”